Should Canada Help Build Trump’s Golden Dome? | The Walrus

In July of 1979, Ronald Reagan, then eighteen months from the presidency, was taken to see the North American Aerospace Defense Command, better known as NORAD. The underground facility, jointly run by the United States and Canada, is carved inside Cheyenne Mountain, near Colorado Springs. In one widely cited account of the visit, many on the tour were visibly awed by the scale and seriousness of the operation. But when Reagan asked what the US could do to stop a nuclear missile, the answer shocked him: nothing.

As the story goes, Reagan was told that all NORAD could do was track incoming warheads and provide information for retaliation. During the flight home, one aide remembered, Reagan “couldn’t believe the United States had no defense against Soviet attack. He slowly shook his head and said, ‘We have spent all that money and have all that equipment, and there is nothing we can do to prevent a nuclear missile from hitting us.’”

Reagan agonized over the idea of the US being vulnerable. “We should have some way of defending ourselves,” he concluded. His vision eventually took the form of the Strategic Defense Initiative: a plan for futuristic weapons in space—lasers, interceptors, armed satellites—that would render nuclear missiles “impotent and obsolete.” SDI was a promise as sweeping as it was speculative, and it ultimately petered out under the weight of its technical limits and astronomical costs.

After Reagan left office, his successors, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, quietly but significantly pared back SDI, largely shelving the space-based part and concentrating on land-based interceptor missiles that could meet a much more limited threat. About two decades later, George W. Bush went forward with this version of the idea. His system was designed to defeat not thousands or even hundreds of weapons launched by a peer adversary but to stop a handful of missiles from a so-called rogue state. Though something workable was produced, it, too, fell short of ambitions (only about half of its highly scripted test interceptions have worked).

Now Donald Trump has unveiled his own iteration of Reagan’s old aspiration: the Golden Dome. He claims it will cost $175 billion (US), be completed by the end of his term, be 100 percent successful, and thus be capable of “forever ending the missile threat to the American homeland.” The plan has notable supporters, mainly Republicans, defence hawks, and industry players. Few credible experts believe the hype. The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, estimates the cost could rise to more than $3 trillion (US) and the system could take decades to build—if it can ever succeed.

Trump has asked Canada to join. He has spoken of between $61 billion and $71 billion (US) as the Canadian contribution—though he has generously offered it to us for free for the mere price of our sovereignty. The previous times missile defence arose, under Reagan and Bush, Canada was also invited. We said no—sort of—and life went on. However, in Trump’s fantasy of the Golden Dome, he wants Canada to commit during his term. Though there were hints of repercussions for refusing to join the Reagan and Bush projects, they never amounted to much. Trump’s assault on our economy makes the possibility of reprisals more serious.

But the key difference between today’s project and the Reagan and Bush invitations is that missile defence itself is no longer a hypothetical. A limited—if leaky—missile defence does now exist, built in Alaska at great cost since the George W. Bush presidency. Although we formally declined to participate, Canada is embedded in its architecture. NORAD operates many of the sensors and networks that support the system. And with significant upgrades to NORAD now underway, even as Canada insists no decision has been made on the Golden Dome, the real question is not whether Canada will participate—but on what terms and to what end.

Since the dawn of the nuclear age, strategists have searched for ways to defend against catastrophic attack. The advent of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) in the 1950s exposed the limits of that goal. In practical terms, there is no reliable way to shoot them down. It requires striking targets moving at extraordinary speed, in the near vacuum of space, across thousands of kilometres—what missile-defence engineers call “hitting a bullet with a bullet.”

By the late 1960s, many in the defence establishment had concluded the price of security was accepting mutual vulnerability rather than chasing the illusion of perfect protection. This came to be known as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), a doctrine enshrined in two key arms control agreements between the US and the Soviet Union in 1972: the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. Together, they sought to make nuclear war untenable by preserving what strategists call an “assured second-strike capability.” Each side would retain the ability to retaliate after a surprise attack, guaranteeing that any country irrational enough to launch a first strike would be obliterated by the retaliatory—or second—strike.

SALT drew most of the attention. It channelled the buildup of arsenals in ways that ensured neither superpower believed it could escape annihilation. The ABM Treaty flowed directly from this reasoning, placing strict limits on missile-defence systems. The thinking was that if you believed you could erect a shield that could stop at least some incoming warheads, the temptation to launch a first strike would grow; you hit early, wipe out most of your opponent’s forces, then rely on your defences to blunt the weakened response. Leaving aside the reality that a first strike would still be madness, as no missile-defence system could ever be fully trusted to deal with the retaliation, the tactic had a certain grim logic. The only answer was to remove the incentive entirely and turn away from the notion that nuclear war could be anything other than a suicide pact.

Not everyone accepted MAD. Some argued it was wrong to foreclose the possibility of ballistic missile defence (BMD). In their view, the assumption of shared extinction condemned the US to accept the existence of the Soviet Union. Even worse, it established equivalence between the two—they would be equally vulnerable. On a political, ideological, and indeed a moral level, the idea that America’s existence required the acquiescence of the godless Soviets deeply offended some people.

By the late 1970s, opponents of the SALT and ABM treaties, and of détente more broadly, controlled the Republican Party, with Reagan as their leader. It did not matter that BMD was impossible. What mattered was that the US should not accept MAD, or any limitations on the effort to overcome it. Reagan’s missile defence was an attempt to will an alternative to MAD into being. As Frances FitzGerald notes in Way Out There in the Blue, her sweeping account of missile defence under Reagan, the pursuit proved “the extent to which our national discourse about foreign and defense policy is not about reality—or the best intelligence estimates about it—but instead a matter of domestic politics, history, and mythology.”

The basic problem for BMD is that physics is stubbornly resistant to ideology. It takes approximately thirty minutes to send an ICBM around the world. A missile shield must respond instantly, distinguish real warheads from decoys, track them as they travel at thousands of kilometres per hour, and guide interceptor missiles—or, in more futuristic schemes, laser beams—to them. It has to be at peak readiness at all times and work perfectly on first use. No complex system has ever achieved this, but this is the standard because of the stakes. Stopping 90 percent of warheads is not enough. McGeorge Bundy, one of the architects of US nuclear strategy, warned that even ten bombs landing on heavily populated centres would be a “disaster beyond history.” BMD must be flawless.

Nor does missile defence make sense if it can be overcome more cheaply than it can be built. Paul Nitze, a central figure in US nuclear policy and arms control, concluded in 1985 that any shield must be “cost effective at the margin.” If it costs far more to intercept a missile than to manufacture one, an adversary can simply overwhelm the defence by adding more missiles. Cheaper still are decoys—dummy warheads designed to force the enemy’s system to fire interceptors uselessly, thereby allowing real warheads to slip through. The result is an arms race tilted in favour of the attacker, who can force the defender to spend endlessly just to keep pace.

Missile defence may never be “cost effective at the margin” until so-called directed-energy weapons, such as lasers and particle beams, can reliably intercept missiles. Such systems would be based in orbit in order to attack the ICBMs as they rise out of the atmosphere in the initial stages of their flight, the so-called boost phase. They would be able to take unlimited shots, provided the energy source is unlimited, and the “cost per shot” would be negligible—though the upfront cost of building the infrastructure would be enormous. The technology shows promise, but as a defence against missiles aimed at cities, space-based lasers are decades from deployment, if they can ever be perfected.

Finally, even if cost-effective BMD were possible, adversaries would not accept it. They would move to defeat it. They would grow their stockpiles and develop missiles with unconventional trajectories, more sophisticated cruise missiles, or ways of clandestinely smuggling nuclear weapons onto enemy territory. A missile shield that renders an adversary’s nuclear arsenal useless won’t be seen by the other side as defence but as an act of aggression. It eliminates their deterrent, leaving them exposed. As Ankit Panda, a nuclear policy analyst, put it in an interview with The Christian Science Monitor, “if tomorrow we woke up and read in the papers that Xi Jinping had just authorized a Golden Dome for China that would render the US’s ability to hit China with nuclear weapons moot, the US would not see that as a defensive measure being taken by China.”

An impervious Golden Dome, as Trump imagines it—absolute protection against all doomsday missiles, including cruise and hypersonic ones—would drive the nuclear arms race in new, dangerous directions.

Will it even work? Beyond bold claims, details remain vague. What has been described publicly amounts to a concept rather than a plan: a layered system combining an expanded version of the existing Bush-era land-based interceptors with new sensors and weapons in space. The promise is total: detect every launch, track every warhead, and stop them all before they land.

But no architecture of any detail has been released, and, again, there is scant evidence the underlying technologies—the space-based lasers especially—are close to serious testing, let alone ready to deploy. Key questions about costs remain unanswered. The proposal resembles Reagan’s earlier missile-defence vision: extravagant in scope, light on specifics, and dependent on breakthroughs that have eluded scientists and engineers for decades.

Golden Dome proponents say they can get there. They point to Israel’s Iron Dome as proof that missile defence can work in practice. The Iron Dome emerged from Israel’s experience with sustained bombardment, particularly from Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and later Hamas in Gaza. After the 2006 Lebanon War exposed Israel’s vulnerability to inexpensive, unguided rockets, the government accelerated the development of a defensive system tailored to that specific threat. Built with US financial and technical support, the Iron Dome became operational in 2011. It has successfully intercepted thousands of incoming projectiles fired at Israel under real combat conditions. Supporters argue that this shows the technology can blunt missile threats and that similar principles could be adapted to protect a country like the US.

But the comparison is misleading. The Iron Dome isn’t optimized for intercontinental or hypersonic warheads. It works precisely because the threat it faces is far slower and simpler. As Ukraine’s then defence minister explained in 2022 when asked why the country did not buy the Iron Dome, he said the system was made to protect against artillery “basically made in garages,” not the sort of weapons Russia is firing at Ukraine.

Moreover, the Iron Dome has a success rate of around 90 percent, and it does not engage incoming fire it assesses as likely to land in an unimportant area. So it is more accurate to say that it is 90 percent effective in cases where it engages. This is impressive, but it still allows 10 percent of missiles fired at population centres to get through, as well as an unknown number of missiles fired at areas the system regards as of lesser importance.

So, to the question “Why can’t we just scale the Iron Dome up to defend North America?” the answer is that defending an area the size of New Jersey from a few pounds of airborne explosives is not the same as safeguarding an entire continent from nuclear-tipped ICBMs. And even for a small-scale defence, Nitze’s “cost effective at the margin” formula still lies with the offence. On October 7, 2023, Hamas fired an enormous number of rockets at Israel, and many got through. According to recent estimates, an Iron Dome interceptor costs between $40,000 and $50,000 (US), while Hamas can manufacture crude salvos for about $600 (US). The Iron Dome has an important psychological effect: the sense of security it gives Israelis allows their political leaders to take risks they might not otherwise. But it cannot defeat thousands of sophisticated warheads and decoys aimed at an exponentially larger geographic area.

Proponents next point to the fact that Israel has already begun to test a laser supplement to the Iron Dome. Dubbed the Iron Beam, the system has successfully shot down rockets, mortars, and drones. But these experiments happened in highly controlled settings. Even there, the obstacles are significant. Lasers are easily degraded by atmospheric conditions, such as clouds, dust, smoke, or rain, which can scatter or absorb the beam before it reaches a target. Range is another limit. The system works best against short-range threats and small projectiles, not high-altitude or long-range missiles. So-called “dwell time” matters too: the laser must stay on a target long enough to disable it. This is a tall order against fast or unpredictably manoeuvring threats.

The next technical development Golden Dome advocates point to is the advent of large, cost-effective constellations of satellites. The private sector has led this charge, with companies such as Starlink launching thousands of assets which orbit the world in previously impossible networks. Supporters argue that sensors and space-based interceptors that can stop incoming missiles at their most vulnerable point—the boost phase—are now possible.

But while these private networks are impressive, they are a fraction of what would be required for BMD. Also, little discussed is the fact that placing key components of the system on Low Earth Orbit satellites makes them obvious targets. This sets the stage for a conflict in which tens of thousands of spacecraft could be attacked by equal numbers of weapons designed to blind them with electromagnetic pulses or destroy them through collision.

The result would be something known as the Kessler Syndrome, in which the debris of countless smashed satellites circles Earth in waves and renders access to space impossible for generations.

So what does Canada do with Trump’s Golden Dome invitation? Both previous times, with Reagan and Bush, Canada’s military wanted to join (there has never been a large US defence project that Canada’s military was not keen to join), but public opinion and other officials were reluctant.

Reagan’s invitation for Canada to participate in the SDI created a dilemma for then prime minister Brian Mulroney. Simply dismissing SDI would not do, even if it would suck up billions and was widely disliked by Canadians. Mulroney’s solution was to decline but refrain from criticizing the initiative while permitting Canadian companies and researchers to take part if asked by the US. It allowed him to say no without offending Reagan. More importantly, it showed Canadians that Mulroney could turn away the US, which protected him from charges that his real ambition—a free trade agreement—smacked of a desire to “sell out” Canadian sovereignty.

A few decades later, the debate in Canada over George W. Bush’s more limited missile-defence plan—called Ground-based Midcourse Defence (GMD)—was fierce. Opponents in the arms control world and at Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department (now Global Affairs Canada), argued that any missile defence would undermine the spirit of strategic stability. The Canadian military countered that Bush’s plan was different from Reagan’s, as it would only stop a handful of incoming missiles—enough to defend against a limited or accidental launch but far too little to counter a large-scale attack by a nuclear power like Russia. Because it could not negate a full retaliatory strike, they argued, it posed no threat to MAD.

Others warned that saying no to Bush could put NORAD at risk. The US might respond by pulling missile tracking out of the binational command. If that happened, it was hard to see what role NORAD would have left.

In the end, the decision taken by then prime minister Paul Martin was political, as both Bush and GMD were unpopular in key Liberal constituencies. But even here, Martin pursued a “no—but” policy. To preserve NORAD, a compromise was fashioned. NORAD provides a critical part of the missile tracking for the Bush-era system, with Canada involved in that stage. But once a decision to launch the interceptor missiles is made, Canadians step back, and control becomes entirely American. As the US ambassador to Canada at the time put it, “We have this odd situation where the Canadians will participate at NORAD, detecting when the missile is launched, determining where it’s heading, and even if they determine it’s heading towards Canada, it’s at that point they’ll have to leave the room because they’re not participating.”

These previous cases matter for understanding Canada’s response to the Golden Dome. In each instance, Ottawa declined to join while taking care not to offend Washington—preserving NORAD and keeping its options open. Would that kind of calibrated refusal work with Trump?

Publicly, aside from the sum Trump wants for membership in his new club, he has not outlined any specific role for Canada. But Canada’s military has effectively been preparing for participation in some aspect of missile defence. Much of this effort centres on an ongoing project to modernize NORAD. In 2022, Canada committed $40 billion to these efforts, including a new Arctic over-the-horizon radar to spot threats far beyond the line of sight.

The focus is on upgrading the sensors needed to detect and track modern ballistic and cruise missiles. NORAD may not have a formal mandate to shoot those missiles down, but improved tracking makes that job easier for those who do. Although this modernization began before the Golden Dome project, missile defence now sits at its centre. Canada has also committed to an integrated approach that dissolves the old boundary between air and missile defence. The new River-class warships (the navy envisages fifteen in total) have been redesigned around American radar systems that allow them to operate as part of a single, shared architecture. The ships can connect to each other and to American ships such that the commander of one vessel, Canadian or American, can order the firing of missiles from others. Within that framework, the American F-35 fighter jet—of which Canada has committed to at least sixteen—matters less as an aircraft than as a flying sensor and data node, designed to link with other platforms at sea and in space.

Put Canada’s networked warships and F-35s together with their American counterparts, place them under command-and-control systems which make Canadian and US assets essentially the same, throw in a modernized NORAD, add the enhanced US ground-based interceptors and the space-based equivalents planned for the Golden Dome, and you have the very definition of a far-reaching missile-defence system: a tightly meshed, seamless web of tracking and strike capabilities coordinating in real time.

Back in 2023, the Canadian government stated that it had made no decision about taking part in US-led missile defence. Anyone examining the kinds of weapons we are buying, the command systems for them, and the operational concepts we have committed to might wonder differently.

America’s dream of protecting itself from nuclear attack isn’t going away. Defence of the sacred homeland is too deeply embedded in the US psyche, and its military-industrial complex has too much invested to let the idea go. A perfect missile defence may never be achieved, but the ongoing search for one is endlessly profitable.

But we should also acknowledge the world is no longer what it was in the 1970s, when MAD underpinned the nuclear order and its two actors, the Soviet Union and America, were fundamentally risk averse. China is a new and different player. Vladimir Putin’s Russia seeks to redraw boundaries and is prepared to threaten Armageddon to do it. Recent entrants in the club—such as North Korea and perhaps Iran one day—possess, or soon might, missiles that can reach North America. Against that backdrop, insisting that 1970s-style MAD is the basis of deterrence doesn’t make much sense, and hasn’t for a long time. Limited missile defences may be justified against small-scale threats, even if larger systems remain destabilizing against others.

For Canada, the current moment is fraught. We seek to diversify trade and military ties away from the US, but geography means that we cannot escape some form of continental missile defence. We want different relations with a Europe that likewise no longer trusts the US, while also forging our own way with China. But it is not an either/or situation: either we have close military ties with the US or we don’t; either we forge new relations with Europe or we don’t; either we find a new way with China or we don’t. The world does not work that way. We need to do all of these things.

It is sometimes said that the beginning of true wisdom is developing the ability to hold two separate, even contradictory, ideas in your head at the same time and act on them both. North American missile defence is likely to be one area where we have to find ways to collaborate with the US even as we go in other directions on other issues. Prime Minister Mark Carney gave this a name in his Davos speech: variable geometry, or “different coalitions for different issues, based on common values and interests.”

The last two times Canada was asked to participate in an American missile-defence project, the debate was binary—yes or no. In both cases, it was framed around whether missile defence would upend the logic of the ABM Treaty. That debate took place in a world with no continental missile-defence systems at all. Today, multiple limited systems already exist, and the ABM Treaty’s core assumption—that stability depends on the total absence of defences—is widely regarded as obsolete.

Any consideration of options has to begin with the recognition that the Golden Dome’s land- and sea-based components are basically developments of a system that already exists: Bush’s GMD. But the Golden Dome’s space-weapons component does not exist. It is also the most disruptive aspect of the project as well as its most fantasy based.

Can Canada stay out of the space-weapons layer of the Golden Dome until the Americans (after Trump has left office) come to the conclusion that it is too expensive and unlikely to work and abandon it themselves? And can we do that as we prepare to join in the land-based and sea-based interceptor programmes, the advanced cruise missile interceptor capability, and the missile warning and tracking aspects—all via a modernized NORAD?

Frankly, that does seem what Canada is already quietly planning for. The full Golden Dome project may take twenty years, if it ever happens at all. Trump himself won’t be in office thirty months from now. And unless he manages to rig the midterm elections, he will likely lose control of Congress—and of the funding for all of this—this fall. We can wait it out.

This ploy would buy time, avoid fuelling an arms race in orbit, and open space for renewed arms control diplomacy among the US, Russia, and China—probably, again, after Trump has left office. Participation in an enhanced version of the current missile-defence system but avoiding Trump’s space-based addition to it would be an argument for pragmatic engagement: accepting a limited shield as reality against less-than-all-out nuclear strikes, while working to build a negotiated nuclear order rather than chasing the fantasy of total invulnerability. Such a world would be more stable and in Canada’s interest.

Complex diplomacy would accompany the building of a new missile-defence system with the objective of working out the rules of the game for those three countries. It would be a return to the kind of diplomacy which characterized the era of SALT and ABM, but with an acceptance that limited defences are now tolerated.

None of this will be easy. The basic concepts of how a three-way deterrent would function are unknown. What this will likely amount to is individual nuclear dyads, based on limited defences against others which do not affect an agreed level of assured destruction between the principals.

How the UK, France, and India fit in the scheme of things is also important. They will want an effective deterrent against states that concern them. India, for example, will not accept a system that undermines its ability to keep China in check. The kind of multilayered diplomacy required to work this out will take years. While all this is going on, perhaps some in the US will decry the idea that any level of nuclear threat to America can be accepted, resurrecting the arguments of the Reagan era that the US can never accept equivalence with morally inferior nations. The fantasy of an invulnerable US will not die, but does America have trillions of dollars to waste on this? It is prudent to assume that, once Trump has left office, the Golden Dome might be quietly scaled back the same way Reagan’s dream was after he left.

As for Canada, it will never sit at the heart of the trilateral diplomacy needed to shape a new strategic order. But we can still play a role in nudging it forward: doing the intellectual spadework, creating avenues for dialogue, and identifying multilateral pieces we can help advance. That would require a long-term commitment of diplomatic resources.

The Golden Dome, as envisaged by Trump, is nonsense. But is the instinct behind it necessarily bad? More importantly, can efforts to create some form of enhanced protection against nuclear attack realistically be stopped? Canada may need to accept that fact and, instead of refusing to engage with what we cannot alter, ask what a stable vision of limited missile defence would look like and explore how we can bring it about.

The O’Hagan Essay on Public Affairs is an annual research-based examination of the current economic, social, and political realities of Canada. Commissioned by the editorial staff at The Walrus, the essay is funded by Peter and Sarah O’Hagan in honour of Peter’s late father, Richard, and his considerable contributions to public life.

Peter Jones is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa.

Romain Lasser is an illustrator and graphic designer based in Montreal.